BATON ROUGE – The first meeting of the Streamlining Procedures, Rules and Regulations Task Force Group of the Transition Advisory Team was held on Wednesday, March 6, at LSU’s Energy, Coast and Environment Building. This task force group is part of the LSU2015 process for the reorganization of LSU.

Task forces have been formed to focus on specific areas of priority in the realignment process, and the Streamlining Procedures, Rules and Regulations Task Force is charged with investigating paper flow, process, authority and accountability including the by-laws of the board of supervisors, presidential memorandums and campus policy statements.

Ann Coulon, LSU AgCenter associate vice chancellor for administration, and Gena Doucet, Pennington Biomedical Research Center human resource management director, conducted a review of personnel policies from the nine campuses to see how they relate to the overall university system.

“The more we can bring those groups, working together on a regular basis,” she explained, “the better chance we have of identifying efficiencies, policies and procedures, and provide ourselves with the amount of oversight and autonomy that we need.”

Coulon detailed how personnel hiring processes can be slowed by these policies, making it more difficult for campuses to retain employees that are in demand, especially faculty.

“We are suggesting becoming an enterprise that is competitive,” said Christel Slaughter of SSA Consultants, who is facilitating these meetings. “We have to cut through the red tape we created ourselves and help the state understand we can handle responsibility. Having those principles in place will help people know they are operating in an appropriate fashion.”

Marie Frank, LSU executive director of procurement, gave a presentation on the topic of state vs. campus authority and regulations pertaining to procurement issues. “There are different levels where centralization is beneficial, and for procurement, this is certainly the case,” Frank said. “We can extend it to all of the LSU System and do things at a standardized, cost-efficient level. We could negotiate contracts at a high level and utilize systems that could be put in place across the entire system.”

The Technology and Revenue Generation Task Force Groups of the LSU Transition Advisory Team will meet on Thursday, March 7, on the LSU campus. Both meetings will be streamed live via the Internet.